- Trump mentioned Mark Zuckerberg by name in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview published Tuesday.
- Trump said he supports TikTok because it competes with Zuckerberg’s platform.
- Last week, Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg if he is elected in November.
Former President Donald Trump can’t seem to resist taking every opportunity to bash Mark Zuckerberg.
The latest attack on the Facebook founder and Meta CEO came in an interview Trump gave to Bloomberg Businessweek, published Tuesday.
The wide-ranging interview, conducted in late June, covered Trump’s views on the economy, foreign policy and his views on several CEOs.
While he praised Apple CEO Tim Cook and JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon, Trump slammed Big Tech companies, calling them “too big” and “too powerful.”
“I don’t want to hurt these companies. But I also don’t want them to destroy our young people,” Trump said.
Trump stressed that while he doesn’t want to break up Big Tech companies because they are important to competing with other countries, he believes some restrictions still need to be put in place.
“If you go after them really hard, you can destroy them,” Trump said. “I don’t want to destroy them. I want them to thrive.”
“But I don’t want them to influence the election. I don’t want them to destroy kids when kids are, you know, committing suicide all over the country, which has happened,” he added, apparently referring to Zuckerberg’s dramatic Senate hearing appearance in January.
During the hearing, Zuckerberg offered a rare apology to families who blamed social media abuse for their children’s deaths.
“I’m so sorry for all that you’ve gone through. No one should have to go through what your family went through,” Zuckerberg told the families in attendance.
While Trump has signaled that he will take a cautious approach to what he calls a “complicated situation,” he has not sounded like he will apply the same nuance to Facebook.
“Now that I think about it, I support TikTok because you need competition,” Trump told Bloomberg. “If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram, and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg.”
Representatives for Trump and Meta did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.
No love lost
Republican presidential candidates have long criticized the Meta chief.
Last week, Trump threatened to imprison Zuckerberg after accusing him of election fraud.
“All I can say is that if I am elected President, we will go after Election Fraudsters at a level never seen before, and they will be thrown in jail for a long time,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on July 9.
“We already know who you are. DON’T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” he added.
The feud between the two appears to have stemmed from Meta’s decision to ban Trump from the platform following the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021. The ban was lifted in early 2023.
“All of a sudden, I went from No. 1 to nobody,” Trump said in an interview with Bloomberg, adding that he now relies on his own platform, Truth Social.
Zuckerberg’s strained relationship with Trump stands in stark contrast to that of his colleagues in Big Tech, some of whom have fully supported Trump.
Zuckerberg’s strained relationship with Trump stands in stark contrast to his colleagues, some of whom — including Elon Musk, fellow PayPal mobster David Sacks, and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz — have fully backed Trump.
Musk, in fact, gave his support just minutes after the failed assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday.
“I fully support President Trump and hope he recovers quickly,” Musk wrote in the X post.
Zuckerberg also commented on the shooting, saying he was “praying for President Trump’s speedy recovery.”
“This is a very sad day for our country. Political violence undermines democracy and must always be condemned,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post.
On Friday, Meta announced that it would remove the remaining restrictions and penalties it had imposed on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Meta said the decision took into account Trump’s formal nomination as the GOP presidential candidate, which took place on Monday.
“In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the presidential candidates on an equal basis,” Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said in a blog post.
